George Arbuthnott Jarrett was one of the most striking debuts in English fiction in the 1960s. There was nothing in Bernard Toms’ background to suggest that this ex-RAF mechanic and former Metropolitan Police officer had a work of such intensity and originality in him. As Irving Wardle, the TLS reviewer wrote:
Originality is the last thing you would normally look for in a novel of introspective analysis, but the narrator of Bernard Tom’s first book has managed to find something new in the mirror. Previously the divided self has found expression either in the Jekyll and Hyde manner, or in the anonymous communings of the stream of consciousness: Mr. Toms has found a middle-ground between these two and written what amounts to an autobiography of a super-ego.
It is a method that gets the best of both worlds: the hero remains intact instead of being split into two characters, while his internal argument develops from the usual colourless monologue into sharply dramatised conflict. The effect is partly a matter of distance: and the extent to which the super-ego’s view of things differs from that of straightforward first- or third-person narrative puts familiar incident into fresh perspective.
George Arbuthnott Jarrett is the story of a man coming apart. As Eleanor Perry wrote in her Life review:
The George part of him is a storming rebel against the strictures of convention. He feels his masculinity, his very humanity, is being crushed by the rules of polite society. He has nothing but contempt for tamed men who spend their lives at desks.
Arbuthnott is his conscience, the defender of morality, the guardian of his soul and his Catholic faith. It is Arbuthnott who narrates the entire story with continual needling interruptions from George.
Arbuthnott longs for what Warren G. Harding called normalcy:
I wish we could be like these other men here. The way they drink is all right; half-pints and a convivial chat with their office friends about their gardens, homes and children. They’re not saints, they like a drink; but with them it’s not a case of gulping down great pints of wallop hour after hour like it is with George. They call in, as I said, for a small, quiet drink to avoid the rush home. They have their values right. After this they’ll go and nestle in the bosom of a family, in a small suburban house–a clean, comfortable, well-ordered house. After dinner they’ll play with the children, decorate a room, tinker with the family car ready for the weekend jaunt, or watch television. In the summer they’ll dig the garden, mow the lawn, tend roses. Dull? No, it’s not dull. That kind of life is dull only to the adolescent mind. Put some of your swashbuckling paramours, your Errol Flynns, your Georges, in a tight corner and they’d give their right arms for such a life.
To which George replies:
Fat, spineless frumps, feeding the little bit of man left in them before rushing off home to poor, adulterous little wifey. Chewing chlorophyll and concocting stories of missed connections and heavy traffic. Washing up after dinner, watching telly, mending and tinkering, assembling and re-assembling; anything to keep sane. I’d rather be shot from a cannon.
The two minds take very different views on even the simplest things. Arbuthnott sees an old newspaper poster floating in the river, turning to pulp. George “sees it as rotting human flesh; it forms the tortured, writhing face of Eve in our dream.” Arbuthnott struggles to stick to a routine, to get to work on time and behave as a good employee. George doesn’t just head for the pub–he heads for the place where the drug dealers, prostitutes, and small-time crooks hang out, and when there, shouts, insults, and provokes them.
Putting the name schizophrenia to their condition merely confirms to George the rightness of his perspective: “I like to think of schizophrenia as an inability to adapt to the petty restrictions of Society…. Well, any many who can’t conform to this bloody idiotic arrangement is probably a damned sight saner than the ones who can and do.” One knows from the beginning that this story won’t end well. From Arbuthnott’s perspective at least. For George, murder, destruction, and imprisonment are nothing more than his rotten world deserves.
Toms published one other novel, The Strange Affair, a solid if conventional police thriller, the year after George Arbuthnott Jarrett, and appears to have done some work as a ghost writer. The Strange Affair was made into a film starring Michael York, but Toms was not involved in the screenplay. He died Newport, South Wales, in February 1990 at the age of 57.